The present invention relates generally to e-mail, and more particularly to selection of recipients of an e-mail.
In an early e-mail system the first line of a message contained the recipient's address. Subsequent e-mail systems and protocols have been defined by RFC (Request For Comments) documents These standards include Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), RFC 2821 and Internet Message Format (RFC 822 and RFC 2822). On the basis of the SMTP model, a user preparing a simple e-mail composes the text of the message and provides additional information which will be sent in a header of the message. The e-mail author indicates the sender name (‘From’ field in the e-mail header), and the recipients. The recipient(s) can be the name(s) of the final recipient (‘To’ field), and optionally, the names of the people that are copied (‘.Cc’ field) and the names of people that are ‘Blind Carbon Copied’ (‘.Bcc’ field). The recipient names correspond to network or “IP” addresses.
The e-mail author can type recipient names into the e-mail address fields or the e-mail author can select a preexisting distribution list. In some business areas such as marketing, the number of recipients (‘To’, ‘.Cc’, ‘.Bcc’) is very important and the management of the addresses can become very complex, time consuming and error prone.
European patent application entitled, “A SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR PREPARING ELECTRONIC MAILS” serial number 04291949.8 filed Jul. 29, 2004 by F. Bauchot, F-X Drouet and G. Marmigere allows an e-mail author to select different recipients for different sections of the e-mail text. The European patent application uses tags in the message text to identify different sections and their corresponding recipient lists. A Selective Mail Parser in a client side e-mail management application identifies the e-mail coded with the tags and prepares the e-mail to be sent to the server side of the e-mail management application. The European patent application also discloses that if the recipient requests to Reply to the e-mail, the system will automatically identify a list of recipients to include all the recipients having a super set of the e-mail.
Other known tools to control a recipient list are based on Directories. Such Directories can either be a general shared Directory or a local address book. The Directories could contain distribution lists which facilitate sending of the e-mail to multi-recipients. For example, a Directory of a sales organization of a company may include a distribution list containing the e-mail addresses of all sales representatives.
According to SMTP, a mailbox is a virtual entity which corresponds to file storage and receives e-mail for a recipient. When it is desirable to treat several mailboxes as a single group (i.e. in a distribution list), a group construct can be used. The group construct allows the sender to indicate a named group of recipients without actually providing the individual mailbox address for each of the members of the group. When the sender creates the message, he/she can identify the name of the group or distribution list as the recipient. In response, the e-mail application operating on its workstation automatically creates a message for each member found in the group or distribution list at the envelope level. The Header of the message contains the name of the group or distribution list.
Another known e-mailing system allows the user to compose e-mail messages and specify lists of recipients with a text editor. The user can use a copy/paste function to select and move e-mail addresses of the e-mail and/or distribution lists to prepare a desired list of recipients in the ‘To’, ‘.Cc’ and ‘.Bcc’ fields.
An object of the present invention is to facilitate identification of recipients of an e-mail.